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'Development Education' in the Global Knowledge Economy

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'Development Education' in the Global Knowledge Economy CHAPTER 8 ‘DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION’ IN THE GLOBAL KNOWLEDGE ECONOMY MODERNIZATION, RATIONALITY AND FREEDOM Amartya Sen (1999), the celebrated Indian Nobel prize-winning Cambridge economist, begins his book Development as Freedom with a defence of the thesis contained in his title, arguing that from his viewpoint the expansion of freedom is both ‘the primary end and the principal means of development’. Sen argues that development is the expansion of substantive freedoms that involves the removal of substantive unfreedoms such as poverty, tyranny, and social deprivation, which constrain choice and impinge on people’s reasoned agency. He recognizes that there are strong linkages between different types of freedom1 and that there is a relation between individual freedom and social development. He thus rejects the narrow view of development in terms of GNP growth or industrialization to align himself with a tradition he dates back to Aristotle, and includes the pioneers of ‘modern’ economics such as William Petty, and prominent figures in political economy and contemporary development economics, including Peter Bauer and W.A. Lewis, who argue that the objective of development is to increase the range of human choice. Sen distinguishes his approach from the narrow view insisting that ‘since freedom is concerned with processes of decision making as well as opportunities to achieve valued outcomes’ (p. 291) our attention in development cannot be confined to outcomes only. He also discusses the relation of his approach on ‘human capability’ to human capital theory that focuses on capital accumulation as educative process rather than a physical one arguing Human capital tends to concentrate on the agency of human beings in augmenting production possibilities … [whereas] the perspective of human capability focuses on … the ability—the substantive freedom—of people to lead the lives they have reason to value and enhance the real choices they have’ (p. 293). In a strong sense, Sen remains true to the rationalist assumptions of the tradition of his discipline classically emphasizing individuality, rationality and self-interest. His major innovation within this tradition is to telescope the classical assumptions of the rational individual agent as choice-maker both backwards to the original wider social and political conceptions that motivated early thinkers and forward to the demands of development economics to make individual freedom a social commitment. His account while reformist and focused on the poor stands squarely in the tradition of liberal economics and thereby is committed to the unvarnished 117 CHAPTER 8 values that motivate development as the founding belief of the modern age: Freedom, Reason, Progress. As such his work might be described as springing from the same Enlightenment principles that first sustained the discipline of liberal political economy out of which modern economics took root. And while his account is highly influential, against narrow efficiency and accounting conceptions, sensitive to culture differences and especially the role of women in development, it remains modernist in value-orientation.2 The field of development studies and its status as an emerging discipline in the post-war era, along with area studies and postcolonial studies, is fraught with divisions based on politics, discipline and methodology. The difference between Sen and the world policy agencies’ narrow measurement of development is not merely a matter of methodology but goes to the heart of a more systematic political philosophy that can embrace arguments concerning the quality of life and different cultural and value perspectives. It also involves in part the internal reappraisal of technical questions from a broader philosophical perspective that relates politics to economics. The assumptions of neoclassical economics have been more centrally questioned. It is perhaps not surprising that mainstream theories of economic growth should dominate the field and also as a primary force help to shape it from it infancy in the post-war era. Paul Krugman (1998) provides a brief sketch of the ‘rise and fall of development theory’ explaining that the crisis of high development theory in the late 1950s was neither empirical nor ideological: it was methodological. High development theorists were having a hard time expressing their ideas in the kind of tightly specified models that were increasingly becoming the unique language of discourse of economic analysis. As he explains ‘The glory days of ‘high development theory’ spanned about 15 years, from the seminal paper of Rosenstein Rodan (1943) to the publication of Hirschman's Strategy (1958)’ but he does not explicitly address the ideological context within which theories of economic development first developed. As Róbinson Rojas (1996) maintains modernization theory per se is the historical product of three main events in the post-World War Two era: the rise of the United States as a superpower and the Western containment of the growth of the international communist movement, with US financing of post-war reconstruction the in Western Europe under the Marshall plan, the industrialization of South Korea and Taiwan, and the post-war reconstruction of Japan; ‘the growth of a united worldwide communist movement led from Moscow and later on also from Beijing (with Soviet Union, People's Republic of China, Vietnam and Cuba as hot points)’; ‘the process of de-colonisation in Africa and Asia as an outcome of the disintegration of the former European colonial empires’. On this basis he reviews the assumptions of modernization theory as it was characterized by the seemingly innocent post-war theory of development by the 118.
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